While many news outlets, mainstream and independent alike, were saturated with updates about the different Supreme Court rulings this week, I made some observations about something that was vastly more intriguing: people’s reactions. In my social terrain within the left-wing spectrum, it was the rulings over civil rights—the right to vote and the right to marry—that garnered the most attention and provoked the most visceral reactions. One day people clogged my inbox and news feed with catastrophic laments over the callous evisceration of voting rights for disenfranchised people of color. The next day were various rainbow-colored displays of elation and relief, with a minor undercurrent of radical critique over the conservative institution of marriage (the latter of which I’m a part of).
Concerning yesterday’s Court case, United States v. Windsor, I find myself ambivalent, and extremely annoyed, with the deradicalized, traditionalist politics it embodies. Enough so that I’ve finally felt it necessary to add my voice to the infuriating cacophony of voices that infiltrate the Web. The notion of marriage has never been a component in my dreams or imagined personal narrative, and felt so distant that I didn’t care to give it more attention than economic inequality and the impacts of disaster capitalism. I’m breaking with this instinct to avoid “equality” talk because I see very little representation of people like me in the cyberscapes.
Do you prefer your oppressive, chemical-ridden carbonated sugar-water in black, brown, or pink? The U.S. v. Windsor (2013) ruling certifiably marks an additional step in the mainstreaming of “LGBT.”
For one thing, the “marriage equality” movement centers around an over-decade-long multidimensional debate with a mind-numbing amount of variables and issues, such as the quandary over dominant social norms, the role of the State in arbitrating interpersonal relations, and the constructions of meaning of the most ambiguous of terms used by liberals: “equality,” “justice,” and “liberation.” The numerous debates and critiques over “marriage equality” speak more to the issue than I ever can, though I think it’s important to highlight the Left critique of this historical practice that occupies such an integral part of the amerikkan imaginary landscape. As many queer theorists and activists rightly argue, “equality” and liberation are not identical concepts (although they may overlap). That “equality” has become virtually a trademark of the mainstream gay rights movement is a testament to how well their conformist, capitalist leaders have coopted a term, turned it into a politically saavy, marketable commodity, and repurposed it to mean a rigid form of formal/legalistic equality before the State. If this what “equality’ means, I want no part in it.
As a queer person of color, I simply don’t relate at all to the movement for marriage equality. Listening to and observing people’s reactions that confirm their deep-seated longings and acceptance for marriage, I can’t help but feel ever-more marginalized as the expansive scope of mainstream neoliberalism accepts more of this post-modern petty-bourgeoisie into its yoke. As dominant society accepts more “diversity” (if not the ever-growing legions of poor people) into its strictly-protected borders, I realize that those of us living in the alternative underground will be further invisibilized. Just as post-modernity fractures us within a kaleidoscope of subcultures, hybridities, and identifications, it can also atomize us to the point of colossal despair.
As someone sympathetic to anarcho-communist principles, such as State-less self-governance and the universal democratization of all human relations, I find marriage to be an extremely conservative institution, an oppressive relic of our sexist and colonial Judeo-Christian heritage. I fear that this latest ruling’s expansion of definitional marriage will only perpetuate an oppressive notion that the State has legal authority to sanction (i.e. “bless”) a particular, two-person relationship with exclusive benefits that would not be available to other, variably arranged relationships (e.g. polyamorous relationships, co-habiting non-spousal family members, non-romantic friends). If nothing else, a widespread legalization and proliferation of same-sex marriages would only deepen, and hence further the normalization and acceptability of, its significance in dominant society.
As a single, chronically ill man of color, I also find marriage to be an out-of-reach concept that has no pertinence in my life and would not, in any conceivable circumstance, proffer me any material benefits. It is alienating and disconcerting to see my affluent, white queers embrace this decision with hugs and wine glasses while I struggle through economic insecurity and chronic disease. The celebratory screams of my former classmates and co-workers simply accentuate the ever-present throbbing in my head as well as my disdain for an expansionist pink capitalism. I also need not say more about the rabid heteronormativity and singlism it perpetuates.
Having unleashed all this venom, however, I recognize that there are actually a number of radical leftists who defend the marriage equality movement in some shape or form. And I agree with some of them. There are great, substantive reasons (including some articulated below) to support a movement that can potentially ameliorate the material realities of marginalized individuals, even if it does come in a reformist package. In some of these more critical arguments in defense of legalizing same-sex marriage, the “movement” is defended as a short-term strategy that can uplift people on the road to revolutionary momentum. Although I can’t expound on these arguments, I think the general idea is that legalizing marriage today, within the oppressive western, white imperialist society we’ve inherited, could at least offer much-needed material benefits—such as adopting a partner’s health insurance, saving on expenses and taxes, and possibly gaining legal residency or other state-sanctioned status. Since I am so disconnected from the very notion of marriage itself (I’ve never had a long-partner), I haven’t devoted much time to extricating the different strands of arguments and can’t make a decision about these arguments with any definitiveness. On the surface, at least, they seem to make sense granted one important condition: that it is done conscientiously, with participants being aware of their complicity in a structure that needs to be radically transformed.
In spite of the negative identity politics associated with marriage equality, I’m hoping, perhaps, that much of those millions of dollars and hours of human energy expended on marriage equality will finally filter into the frontlines of the working poor and add much needed fuel to the fights for humane housing, immigrants’ rights, labor justice, and health care equity. Perhaps.
Here are some articles and cases that DO reflect a good, immediate-term usage of marriage equality:
Colorlines: What DOMA Ruling Means for LGBT Families of Color
Colorlines: DOMA Ruling Clears Path for Binational Couples
Politico: DOMA ruling stops deportation hearing at last minute
Left* arguments around queer liberation and the same-sex marriage movement:
Scot Nakagawa (03.25.13): Why I Support Same-Sex Marriage as a Civil Right, Not as a Strategy to Achieve Structural Change
Tamara K. Nopper (05.19.12): Beyond the Access Narrative: Marriage Politics, Austerity, Surveillance
Kate Bornstein (12.04.09): Open Letter to LGBT Leaders Who Are Pushing Marriage Equality
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (11.02.09): Why Gay Marriage IS the End of the World (or the queer world, at least)
Yasmin (07.06.09): Legalize Gay, Or: So You Think You’re Illegal?
Dean Spade & Crag Willse: I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal
Hear from Dean Spade, Kenyon Farrow and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in Queer Voices: Beyond The Queer Mainstream – Beyond Gay Marriage and the Mainstream Gay Movement:
[audio http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20130630-Sun1100.mp3]
I seek to be free, not another consumerist cog in the white imperialistic power structure.
Decolonize Chris! 